Experimental and Modelling Performances of a Household Solar Dryer for Drying Banana

This article presents a household solar dryer’s experimental performance for drying banana and presents modelling of the solar dryer for drying banana. This new type of solar dryer setup consists of a parabolic roof structure covered with a polycarbonate sheet on a collector flat plate. This solar dryer has a base of 0.90 × 1.90 m2 and 0.45 m in height. Two 9-W DC fans powered by one 20-W PV modules were used to ventilate the dryer. Drying experiments have been a performance for banana during from January to September 2019. To investigate the experimental performance, the dryer was used to dry 10 full-scale experimental runs, and 10 kg of ripe bananas were dried for each experiment. The air temperature inside the dryer varied from 35 to 55°C from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm. The moisture content of banana decrease from an initial moisture content of 72% (wb) to a final moisture content of 20% (wb) within 4 days, whereas the moisture content with natural sun dried was reduced to 32% (wb) under similar weather conditions. The banana being dried in this solar dryer was completely protected from animals, rain, and insects, and good quality product in terms of flavor and texture were obtained. A system of partial differential equations describing heat and moisture transfer during drying of banana was developed and solved numerically using the finite difference method. The simulated moisture contents agreed well with the experimental data for the solar drying of banana.